Engineering Projects

Senior Design Capstone Project: Automation in Manufacturing

I am currently working on a team of four students to deliver solutions for Halliburton Energy Services. Our goal is to present at least three business cases for implementation of new automation technologies to enhance a specific manufacturing facility. We plan to see at least one of our solutions fully implemented and productive by Spring 2019. I was elected by my team to be Project Manager. So far my activities as Project Manager have included organizing and carrying out team meetings, establishing the main channels of communication with our mentor located in Houston, creating agendas for team research, outlining sprints, and keeping up with team assignments such as project reports.

Engineering Entrepreneurship:

From design of a product to start-up company

I spent my junior year on a class project, in which I worked on a team to build a product up to a launch ready start-up. We focused on issues that millions of diabetics face everyday. We conducted over 100 in person interviews to discover what those main issues were and continued to conduct interviews to receive feedback throughout our ideation process. We nearly perfected a solution, Minimod, which was an all-in-one glucometer device that would help diabetics on the go. It was a single pocket size unit that held five consecutive uses that didn't require multiple components or reloading. We produced a functional device and constructed a business plan for launch by the end of the semester. It even became a research topic for an Intellectual Property course on campus, in which students investigated the patenting challenges that would come with moving this product into the market. My team and I did intend on submitting our project for a Venture Well competition. However, academic and professional commitments over the following summer did not allow our team to continue collaboration. Below is a PDF, our report of our project that details our interviews, ideation process, specifications, and business acumen in our work throughout the year.

Modeling and Simulation

Engineering Leadership introduced me to code during my sophomore year in "Mod Sim". In this class, we learned how to program and conduct simulations using MATLAB software. I programmed the first simulation of this course with another Engineering Leadership student, in which we created difference equations and converted them into code to analyze the dynamics of symbiotically related populations of sharks, stingrays, and scallops. We particularly conducted our own basic simulation to observe how shark and stingray populations are effected by current fishing customs and how the species generally react over time.

I conducted a second project with three of my peers. This time, we simulated a system of differential equations that most of us were familiar with from our differential equations course, the SIR model. This demonstrates the relationship and dynamic of susceptible, infected, and recovered populations. We converted the system into code as functions, which we called to in our main code to solve and plot.

Design Nature:

Rolling Locomotion

Our freshman Engineering Leadership Design Nature course required students to design and build a mechanism inspried by movement found in nature with limited materials. Our devices needed to have a biomimetic approach to their movement and a trigger to allow the mechanism to act on its own.

For this project, I built a mechanism that mimics the rolling "flight reaction" of the Mother of Pearl Moth Caterpillar, which escapes predators by curling "head to tail" and rolling backwards at speeds to up 40 mph.

My three inch long device is solely comprised of 3D printed disk-like segments, heat shrink tubing, two suction cups, and about 12 inches of aluminum rod that connects the disks.

To the right are photos of my final device, followed by a partial dynamic simulation and a short video of the working device.